This is in response to the article “Proper Pronouns Are Important, But We Still Struggle”, by Paul Hartzer.

Language change for closed classes of function words like pronouns is slow and difficult. It is easy for people to accept new nouns as names for new kinds of things, but hard to accept new prepositions, conjunctions, or pronouns.

Our existing set of pronouns in English has a number of deficiencies. One is the now well-known requirement to choose gender or inanimate for the third-person singular (he, she, or it). Another is our lack of a distinction between inclusive and exclusive "we". If I say "We are going to a party", is the listener invited? Maybe, as Donna B.'s comment suggests, we should use "we'all" for inclusive we.

In fact it's easy to say "We're all going to a party" for the inclusive version of we. So the problem is more with the possessive "our", and it's subtle: If, in the presence of several other people, call them A, B, and C, I say to C, "Would you like to come to our party?", it may not be clear who else other than I, the speaker, is/are included in the "our", and who else other than C is being included or excluded from the invitation. The disambiguation can have a lot to do with who is standing near whom. It's easy to create scenarios in which either A or B, or both A and B, or neither A nor B are included in the "our" or in the invitation. More context is required.

For "they" there is also an issue of number agreement. When "they" is used in place of "he" or "she", should we say "They likes their coffee black" or "They like their coffee black"?

It's a worthy goal to remove gender from pronouns, but it's going to take some time. At least we're lucky that English doesn't make gender distinctions for nouns like other languages do, although those are mostly nonsensical. (Why, in German for example, is a fork feminine, a spoon masculine, and a knife neuter??)